Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. He co-chairs the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and serves on the program committee of National Robotics Week.

UPDATE: I had a good meeting with Peter Kazanjy about Unvarnished. My thoughts on that meeting and what I learned here. Among other things, Unvarnished has now cleaned up its privacy policy to address many of the concerns I mention below.

Like many of you, I'm trying to figure out what the personal reputation website Unvarnished (now in beta) is all about. I notice that I need to sign in through Facebook Connect before I can kick the proverbial tires. So, before turning over my entire Facebook profile to a unknown entity, I decide to check out Unvarnished's privacy policy. I find I don't understand it.

There's an app for everything these days. But users often don't have a complete picture of the applications they download and use. Privacy policies are technical or vague and seldom allow users to compare practices among different services. Too often users are compelled to forgo their privacy if they want to use a given online product or service. There is little ability to choose an application based on better privacy or security practices because there are few ways to learn that information at the time of download.

Indeed, ninety-one percent of respondents to a TRUSTe survey expressed a willingness to take further steps to safeguard their privacy if presented with usable tools. WhatApp.org is an app review website that tries to do just that. WhatApp.org combines traditional consumer reporting and review tools with wikis, ratings, and news feeds to allow both savvy Internet experts and novices to share insights about privacy and security features. With nearly 200 applications from a diverse array of platforms (iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, Android, and Firefox), WhatApp.org aims to help fill the current market gap between consumer demand for privacy friendly applications and insufficient practices employed by many, though certainly not all, developers. Here's how to get involved:

Reading through Italian news coverage of the Google Italy case, another picture emerges. User privacy may well be at issue, but not in the way you probably think. I grew up in Italy and now research and teach Internet law in the United States. When I heard about the verdict against three Google executives, one of them an alumnus of the law school where I work, I went first to American sources, then to Italian ones. What I found was that most Americans may be getting the basic facts and ideas of the case wrong.

Chatroulette is frame to much of what is terrible and much of what is wonderful about the Internet. It is the best of websites and it is the worst of websites. In case you’re one of the few people that reads cyberspace blogs but doesn’t know about the service, Chatroulette sets up a video, audio, or text chat session with a completely random stranger. Either party to the arrangement can skip to the next. That’s about it. Chatroulette does not require registration let alone age verification, although the site makes noises about having to be at least 16. You can change the display a little. There, I’ve described it.

Chatroulette takes many of the most interesting facets of the Internet and runs them into their no-frills, logical boundary. The Internet permits anonymous speech; Chatroulette can be completely anonymous. The Internet permits people to connect across diverse communities; Chatroulette practically forces this connection. It is deeply democratic in the sense that it makes no effort to privilege one type of content over another. The brainchild of a Russian child, reportedly hosted in Germany and written in English, Chatroulette is dramatically international. It connects the curious youth of Europe, to you and I, to the white-hatted frat boys of America, to all the weird anywhere shut-ins in between.

Pam Dixon of World Privacy Forum has released an eye-opening new report (PDF) about offline consumer surveillance. Pam describes a quiet revolution in digital signage able to profile us as "users" of real space. I've writtenbefore about the danger of techniques developed on the Internet bleeding out into the real world. Well here is the proof. As Wired's Chris Anderson recently wrote in another context, "atoms are the new bits." Pam's report shows just why that matters.

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"“It’s certainly the case that birthday and name alone are unlikely by themselves to lead to identity theft, or they shouldn’t,” said Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor specializing in digital issues.

Calo said government has legitimate concerns about releasing records that could cause problems, such as information about children. Privacy is important and deserves protection, he said."

"“Right now these systems are either not doing what they’re supposed to be doing or they’re doing things in ways that allow the companies that are selling them to hide behind trade secrets, so what I would say … is that California should not deploy these systems in any aspect of government until it really feels like it understands what the system does, and that the system is amenable to the kinds of guarantees and processes and procedures that we have made formally to our citizens,” Calo said."

"Microsoft is working on some of these areas through groups such as the Partnership on AI, which includes rivals like Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. Still, the call for more regulation in an emerging area like AI is unusual for technology companies, said Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who has read the book.

"The law has been unable to keep up with rapid advancements in auto technology, according to Ryan Calo, an associate professor of law at the University of Washington who teaches courses on robotics law and policy.

“Ultimately, there’s no car privacy statute that car companies have to abide by,” he said. “Not only are automakers collecting a lot of data, they don’t have a particular regime that is regulating how they do it.”"

"“Obstruction of justice definitions vary widely by country,” says Ryan Calo, a cyberlaw professor at the University of Washington. “What’s clear is that Uber maintained a general pattern of legal arbitrage.”"

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U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene a hearing on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, at 3:00 p.m. entitled “Exploring Augmented Reality.” The hearing will examine the emergence, benefits, and implications of augmented reality technologies. Unlike virtual reality that creates a wholly simulated reality, augmented reality attempts to superimpose images and visual data on the physical world in an intuitive way.

The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW’s Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. The event is free and open to the public but requires registration. -

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Nobody likes to wait in line. So today, Amazon removed that unpleasantness from the neighborhood grocery store. At Amazon Go, you walk in, pick up your groceries and walk out.

There are no checkout lines or scanners and almost no employees, just sensors and cameras. But what is that convenience going to cost you? We talk with Geekwire’s Todd Bishop and University of Washington law professor and privacy expert Ryan Calo.

The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW’s Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology.

Simon Jack reports from Seattle on robots at work. From the Boeing factory where robots make planes to a clothes shop where a robot helps him buy a new pair of jeans. Plus Ryan Calo, professor of law at the University of Washington, grapples with the question of who to blame when robots go wrong, and whether there is such a thing as robot rights.

There are a million ways people might use drones in the future, from deliveries and police work to journalism. But in this episode, we’re going to talk about consumer drones — something that you or I might use for ourselves. What does the world look like when everybody with a smart phone also has a drone?